Pages

Friday, October 9, 2015

The Great Devolution

I have been struggling for a
while with what to call this period we are currently going through as “a global
community of nations”. Is it a second Cold War -- Cold War II: Return of the
Improbable & Unnecessary? Is it a new Great Game (now with more graphic
violence and gratuitous mass killing)? Or, is it a New Westphalian Era (because
we really didn’t have enough megalomaniacs the first time around)?

But none of these epithets seem
to capture the spirit of the age, an age in which an order that was more “official”
and “formalized,” no matter how tentatively, than anything we have ever had
before, is collapsing long before it fulfilled any of its promises, especially
those related to democracy, justice, accountability, and the responsibility to
protect civilians from all harm, natural, and man-made. Indeed, the only term
that seems to make any sense at all is the one long introduced by American
science fiction author, Alexander Jablokov, in his celebrated novel, Nimbus
(1995): the Devolution Wars. Are we going through the era of the Great
Devolution?

Though my understanding of
current developments lead me to think of them more as a restructuring process,
mostly unguided and, at times, ill-guided, subject to certain objective laws
that governs general population dynamics, and the interactions between distinct
population groups, be they defined nationally, linguistically, religiously or
socioeconomically, I think the term Devolution is far more appealing, and
captures enough of the spirit of the age to warrant consideration.

So, welcome to the Great
Devolution people, the era where, despite the obviously flawed nature of all
our schemes, there will always be enough conspiracy theories and theorists, and
enough ideological filths, filth-peddlers, and filters around to keep us all
guessing about the “truth” and fighting over our guesses for decades,
perhaps even centuries, to come. Come to think of it, perhaps, it should be
called The Age of the Great De-Enlightenment. The New Dark Ages – now with far
more darkness not so carefully camouflaged under the accumulating pretenses of
a know-it-all mentality.

Go ahead, patronize me!

About Ammar

Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian-American author and pro-democracy activist based in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is the founder of the Tharwa Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to democracy promotion. His personal website and entries from his older blogs can be accessed here.

The Delirica

The Delirica is a companion blog to the Daily Digest of Global Delirium meant to highlight certain DDGD items by publishing them as separate posts. Also, the Delirica republishes articles by Ammar that appeared on other sites since 2016. Older articles can be found on Ammar's internet archive: Ammar.World